raymor

If you need atimes and so can't use noatime, consider if relatime will work for you. If you do need atimes, you can NOT use nginx because it causes atime updates to be skipped whether you like it or not. That's why in tests with atimes on it appears faster on small files - because it's (erroneously) skipping atime updates.

That's how we found out about the importance of noatime. Analyzing the nginx code to see why it appeared to be faster for tiny files, I found that the only significant speed difference was skipping that disk access, even if the server admin had specified otherwise.

If you have to have atimes and relatime won't work, then, you need a server which allows atimes to be updated correctly (Apache) and a storage subsystem with low rotational latency (high RPM) and low seek times.